SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“And perhaps a great day will come when a people distinguished by war and victory, by the highest development of its military organization and intelligence, and accustomed to making the gravest sacrifices to these things, will choose to exclaim, “We will break the sword into pieces!”—and will demolish its entire military machine down to its deepest foundations. To disarm while being the best armed, as an expression of elevated feelings—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition toward peace: whereas so-called “armed peace” such as that which parades in every country nowadays, is a disposition toward hostility that trusts neither itself nor its neighbor and, partly out of hatred, partly out of fear, refuses to put down its weapons.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, (my edits) http://bartleby.com/66/83/42183.html
The United States is
so dualistic, it must have a rising sign in Gemini. It is at once lenient and oppressive, utilitarian
and mythic, genuine and fraudulent, placid yet deeply disturbed, egalitarian
and hierarchical, peace loving and jingo, brilliant yet desperately blah.
This may have a lot to do
with the contrast Professor Allen C. Guelzo notes during his lecture series,
‘The American Mind,’ available on CD through the Teaching Company at http://www.teach12.com. According to him, Americans are sundered
between reason and will, intellect and action.
Which habit is more
worrisome to you: failing to act in time or failing to think through the
consequences of your action? Are you
more afraid of analysis paralysis than of the unintended consequences of your
behavior?
Your response will
pigeonhole you into one of two categories of Americans. On the one hand, people like George W. Bush
and his cronies who rush in where angels fear to tread, based on faith, gut
instinct, dogma, pure greed or some other BS; and their mirror-images,
so-called “peace and progress activists” who haven’t a clue what they are doing
and could care less about their to-date permanent state of failure. On the other hand, people like John Kerry,
Bill Clinton and their supporters who never met an idea they couldn’t dissect
from now ‘til Sunday, without doing anything much in the meantime; and people
like me and fellow ideologists stuck in our own brown studies.
Each group resents the
intrusion and failure of the other; each wishes it could monopolize political
and economic power. The political
balance between these two tendencies must be meticulously maintained;
pre-emption by one or the other has proven disastrous in the past and could be
fatal in the future.
America is in a state of
perpetual self-contradiction. Change and
tradition are equally valued here; the best and worst of art and good taste are
produced in vast quantities, prized dearly and then cast out as rubbish. America’s fruitful plains of bear the fairest
harvests on Earth, bar none. Yet both at
home and abroad, we strip-mine the soil, poison crops, deplete fisheries, abuse
farm animals and ruin family farmers. As
a result, much of this bounty gets over-processed into a noxious sludge fit
only to grow obese on, burn, and encrust the land with layers of solid, liquid
and gaseous filth.
If you stroll across an
urban landscape in America, it is like walking across the bottom of a gigantic,
almost empty garbage dumpster:
depressing litter everywhere.
American law simulates
justice in sporadic fits, depending on the wealth and notoriety of the accused. Equity under strong courts is the letter of
the law; self-promotion through vicious competition is its spirit. When a poor guy is swept into the Prison
Empire run for profit by reactionaries, he is dropped into Hell on Earth,
regardless of his real guilt or innocence.
Judgeships offer many lofty sinecures for stealth reactionaries and
monstrous control freaks, and a few humble watchposts for brilliant legal
minds—at least at junior levels where the ever-reactionary Congress cannot
meddle.
When the Twin Towers fell
in what was obviously a controlled demolition (no building that tall would
collapse by accident on its own footprint―anyone who says so is a damned
liar and a fool to take me for a fool), the first thing Congress made sure of
was that families of high-income victims would get higher compensation. I cannot find a better illustration of what
has become routine Congressional slime; there are many more. For example, why didn’t it investigate who
controlled that demolition, much less the obvious evidence of their misdeed?
Many green shoots of
idealism spring up, here and there, across an intellectual wasteland of
hypocrisy, greed and closed mindedness.
Americans have defended freedom and slavery, liberty and tyranny with
equal sincerity and ferocity. In
America, progressives maintain the illusion of harmony with conservatives, and
liberals with reactionaries, by agreeing to disagree about democracy’s
fundamental definition.
Orthodox politicians and
media pundits maintain that 'representative democracy' and the vote are
sacred. Yet ballots are miscounted by
the millions, especially in the Dixiecrat South. Recent voting scandals in Florida and Ohio
are just the tip of an iceberg of Southern crypto-racism that diffuses its
chill up North.
No one seems to care that
American voters constitute an Spartan minority surrounded by a majority of
idiot slaves, or that no Greek tyranny was run by such an anti-democratic
minority as our corporate slave masters and their thought-police.
As long as Learner topics of passion are not given priority in public
discussion, the pool of leadership talent must shrink, decision-makers get
dumber, and unintended consequences become more disastrous. Simple arithmetic.
After throwing back a few
British assaults, America’s European colonists concluded that they were
invulnerable to foreign invasion behind their oceanic moats. Blessed with vast virgin lands to exploit,
they invited mass immigration that other, more crowded nations had to resist. Our real-life freedoms and opportunities
surpassed everyone else’s dreams.
With the exception, of
course, of dispossessed American Indians, and of Blacks abducted from their
African homeland. Both sets of victims –
numbering in the millions – were denied the right every American citizen values
most: free welcome into fellow citizenship.
A welcome everyone on Earth deserves; the same welcome that held the
Roman Empire together, wherever its citizens came from—at least until
born-again Huns took over and wrecked everything.
Can’t you see the same
thing happening here and now? Shall we
sit still for this Vandal scandal like lead-dummied Romans, or resist it with
all our might? True, our poisons are
more toxic and widespread. Will we prove
strong and smart enough to overcome them?
Thus, American business,
art and science – even organized religion – benefited from massive peace
inputs. Nonetheless, without really
knowing why, Americans nursed racial bigotry, mass poverty, ethnic genocide,
slavery and civil war. The main reason
they subsidized weapon mentality in blatant defiance of the Constitution, was
to retain a razor-sharp weapon technology against outsiders. This in keeping with the Old World tradition
of instant cutthroat by government command.
The proliferation of
biological, scalar and nuclear weapons confounds America’s moat defense. Thus is fading our sense of strategic
invulnerability along with collateral prosperity and freedom.
From the Korean War to
those in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, each became more expensive,
unjustifiable, corrupting and harmful to our best institutions. Since such military adventures had to end in
failure and disgrace, American reactionaries made their way home to start hunting
among their own people for their next prey.
Indigents, immigrants, minorities, children, drug users, victimless
criminals, the homeless, mental patients, natural ecosystems—anyone and
anything that seemed vulnerable enough.
Remember, rising dread of
outside threat multiplies homegrown reaction and poverty, as each weapons elite
pledges to protect its info proletariat from elites abroad (apparently horrid
but actually identical).
Radicals and reactionaries
misbehave with boring predictability.
Regardless of their origin, ideology, race and other cosmetic
distinctions, they believe their society won't cohere unless it confronts a
horde of potential enemies. Internal or
external, make-believe or real, it matters little who those Others really are.
To leftists, the ultimate
foes are the rich. Centrists’ favorite
bogeymen are surly foreign powers and crafty criminals. Reactionaries define the enemy as anyone weak
enough (in control of few votes and little wealth). All three of them esteem brutality as a
cure-all.
These enemies often turn
out to be illusory. When real threats
emerge, they tend do so from out of the blue.
Many aggressors, (Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Adolph Hitler, Osama
bin Laden, for example), were funded by the same authorities hired to keep an
eye on them.
When projected threats
turn out to be significant and trigger vigorous defensive measures set in place
to checkmate them, jingo politicians plug their ears to warnings of impending
disaster and let it happen anyway, seemingly through sheer incompetence. In fact, they go to great lengths to provoke
the violent reaction their plans require.
In one sense, America has
come to the end of its era of strategic immunity based on oceanic moats. According to our praetorians, we must adopt
permanent weapon mentality – even in times of peace – and accept its
overheads. Otherwise, we risk being
relegated to second-class status. My
question is: second-class to whom?
When the United States
sneezes, the other powers get pneumonia.
During the 1970’s, the OPEC nations reversed their oil embargo; not
because their chokehold had crippled the Great Satan, but because it was
throttling the golden goose. They
realized, a little late, that the real victims of their petroleum price hikes
turned out to be among the poorest of their allies and trading partners.
Rising crime and
unemployment statistics enumerate the raw deal of American weapon tyranny. These nightmare sums are nothing compared to
the hell we may expect if we let smooth-talking Wimps and Prisms con us into Armageddon.
Just as peace management
would seek to make life as productive and rewarding as possible, weapon
management longs for inequalities of wealth, creativity and security. Life must become so uncertain that military
enlistment seems like a boon for many poor children. Weapon mentality creates a vast labor pool of
human drones: willing codependents of repression, warfare and criminality.
Remember, every suppressed
demonstration, illegal arrest, unresolved act of police brutality, and Banana
Republican croaking “More repression!” reveals a panicked elite lashing out
against political nightmares more frightful to it than any real mob or
insurrection.
Conservatives share a
common weakness. They may sustain old
values, but cannot nurture new ones.
Faithful to weapon mentality, they lack peace mentality’s creative
spark.
It took three hundred
years, from the 1200's on, for European conservatives to adopt the zero in
arithmetic.
Progressives cannot
propose a new approach to abundance without conservatives resisting “to
(someone else’s) death” beforehand.
Conservatives cannot make themselves believe that everyone would be
better off once wealth were shared more evenly; they refuse to picture the
wealth they might achieve by unrestrained sharing. So they feel compelled to misappropriate
wealth and creativity on a zero-sum basis.
“What I gain, you must lose.”
This despite history’s
most persistent lesson: societies remain poor insofar some minority
misappropriates wealth. The smaller, in
proportion, this wealthy minority remains, the more restricted and thus stupid
its decision-making, the simpler its social structure and the poorer the host
nation.
The genetic heritage of a
restrictive elite must also suffer. Its
children, genetically weaker than sturdier crossbreeds, will suffer higher
infant mortality in direct proportion to this restriction of worthy mates. A closed elite may eliminate itself entirely
in this manner, during the next stretch of heightened infant mortality.
Ancient wealth trickled like
a mountain rivulet, from one god-king to his tiny court hermetically sealed
from the unwashed masses. It bubbled
along creek-beds of medieval nobility and priesthood, carefully diked off from
their inferiors. It then streamed
between the Victorian upper-bourgeoisie, clerics and general staff. These worthies held the masses at
bayonet-point outside the magic circle of wealth.
Today, this wealth
meanders along tributaries of professionals and officers/bureaucrats. They try to buy off the underclass at minimal
expense, with (factory-farmed burger-bun) bread and circus (television). Before long, all the wealth on Earth will
flow into the most deserving of seas, that of every Learner worldwide. At each stage of redistribution, as if by
magic, everyone’s wealth increases exponentially.
Reactionaries can whine
all they want; they can kill, torture, lie and steal as much as their cowardly
panic allows. They will be the poorer
for it and will never escape this inevitable conclusion of history. If they acted a little bit more wisely, they
would profit exponentially once and for all.
Natural disasters and
warfare weaken peace management. Social
harmony is a delicate fabric woven from many strands of mutual trust,
cooperation and good will. This web is fragile;
it frays under stress and soon parts.
During disasters, the distribution of necessities breaks down. That incites people to looting, personal
vengeance and other forms of lawlessness.
“Civilization is just a question of fodder,” Berthold Brecht. Facing unaccustomed overloads, routine
protocols become sporadic, unfair and inadequate; rigidity, uncertainty and
centralization set in. Opportunistic Conspirators of Greed proliferate, as does the synergy of
their ill effects. Tyranny re-asserts
itself as peace technologies whither. As
the situation worsens, traumatized societies shift from marginal peace to
climax weapon production—voila (vwahlah! “Here is”) true war fever.
An intermittent pandemic
appears to afflict entire societies.
While majorities sink into economic and spiritual decline, a dwindling
minority amasses undeserved riches.
Traditional values and sources of security are uprooted until combat
itself begins to look promising.
This pandemic of social
degeneracy was most apparent during the Great Depression. The carnage of World War I may have converted
most info proletarians into ardent pacifists, but it converted key elites into
fanatical weapon sectarians who made sure the Great Depression would so pummel
info proletarian sensibilities that World War II came as a relief.
The best military recruit
is a slum child. This Golden Rule of
weapon mentality applies just as much to bitter ghetto sociopaths as to the
sweet majority of street urchins. The
lucky ones survive their inevitable abuse.
Their parents and guardians do their utmost to help them, within limited
means. Nevertheless, awash in
self-loathing, slum children are driven to join something greater than
themselves. Hardened survivors, they can
handle grinding adversity, harsh discipline and the terrors of combat. Their gang leaders have been street-tested in
armed combat. Those children who fail to
adapt, die young.
By following this simple
formula, weapon management can harvest an enormous crop of fine infantrymen at
an instant’s notice. The more brutal
their childhood, the greater the number of valuable recruits and invaluable
small unit leaders. The end products are
countless regiments of fine infantry; a sprinkling of elite commandos manned by
certifiable sociopaths; a handful of sterling Learners like Booker T.
Washington, M.L. King, Jesse Jackson, Cornell West, General/Secretary of State
Collin Powell and their high-merit peers; and throngs of poverty-, ignorance-
and crime-crippled victims. They are the
massive human tailings of a rarefied ore from which – at great wastage –
precious battle elites and expert weapon technicians may be refined.
“The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only secondary. Poverty, privation and want are the schools of good soldiers.” Napoleon, taken from Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, Little Brown & Co., Boston, New York, Toronto, London, 1995. Printed by permission.
Weapon management imposes
long-term destitution on any society that hosts it. This fact is papered-over with standard
weapon myths we have been taught to admire for ages. Anything and everything – bad weather,
hostile gods, heretics, witches, druggies, drug lords and petty criminals, an
aging workforce, welfare moms, inferior minorities, guerrillas and now
terrorists – can take the blame for shriveling economies that should be thriving
but never manage to.
For mature societies, mass
poverty is never the cheapest way to go; on the contrary, it is the most
expensive social policy. Let me
repeat that for emphasis, since we’ve been told it so rarely (never).
Poverty is the most
expensive social policy, by far.
No society ever
grew rich by tolerating poverty. Info
elites waste enormous wealth as they cultivate poverty and many other
anti-profit weapons overheads.
By rights, that wealth
should be ours to invest in peace. You
would be amazed by the quality of peace Learners could buy with it, and the
quantity of violence Learners could buy off with a tiny fraction of it.
However, higher living
standards breed spoiled, argumentative and self-indulgent people: totally
unsatisfactory cannon fodder. Social
decadence is not bad per se, but it
would be unwise to maximize prosperity and pacifism in one’s own people while
the rest of the world attempts to meet its needs at gunpoint.
Mass poverty is never some
stupid policy failure; it is not the outcome of selfish greed, insanity and
corruption. Those are mere symptoms of
the underlying illness: weapon mentality.
In fact, all money – the
entire growth-dependent, zero-sum shell game based on compound interest so dear
to politicians, business people, academics and conservative parasites who make
up info elites – is merely a system of accounting for the huge sums of wasted
labor and resources destined to feed global weapon technologies without
producing any profit whatsoever. ‘Lack
of money’ is our favorite excuse to rebuild anti-profit slums in the wake of
our destructive wars.
There is a chicken and egg
problem here: what came first? When
orthodox economies go into decline, for whatever reason, reflexive militarism
becomes an irresistible means to reassemble wealth at the top. When massed humans become all of a sudden
poor, their first instinct will be to dust off ancient military protocols.
When I speak further on
about Americans, I am also talking about all the others on Earth who have lost
their soul in the naked embrace of weapon mentality. Make sure you are not suffering from the same
illness while you gleefully slam Americans benighted by it.
Americans have been
suckled on a toxic pap of obsessive materialism and vapid self-gratification
gushing inexhaustible from luscious tits of television and its commercial
advertising. By such means, they’ve been
taught to obey their conscience only when it’s convenient, common sense only
when convenient, good taste only when convenient. Political and social
transformation won’t take place until it is convenient―or they will never
happen, better yet.
They act as if their
misdeeds, apathy and lousy decisions had no consequences. “If you don’t like what’s going on, just
change the channel. Better yet, sit
still and wait for the next meaningless commercial. Nothing of significance will change,
regardless of what you do—and insignificance will multiply, regardless of what
you do.” It has become a frenzy among them, to pursue mere indulgence to
its extreme and exult blindly in their blind impunity. Thus American crooks and bigots thrive,
protected by a slapdash definition of personal freedom.
The balanced reporting of
American journalism? That just means evil is always given a head
start. Whoever can pay more is entitled to lie, cheat, steal and get away
with it indefinitely, more so than anyone poorer. The end product of “balanced American
reporting” is dollar democracy: one million dollars equal one vote, and one
voter equals nothing.
Someone else is always to blame for downstream disasters, not us
Americans. We keep telling ourselves those disasters were aberrations,
and not the toxic backwash of our rotten habits and institutions. Thus there’s no reason to change them!
Bismarck remarked that God
seems to favor Americans, drunkards and crazy people. So Americans seem
to get away with their shitstorm, more often than not. As a result,
America has become nation of spoiled brats.
But the moment God looks
the other way, duck and cover! 9/11, New Orleans and Gulf of Mexico
disasters emerge, of epic proportion. At that point, Americans feel so
sorry for themselves. And, of course, it must have been someone
else’s fault. How could it not?
This nation’s business
would not be so appalling if its citizens grew up just a little.
But they are, after all,
only babies compared to Europeans’ deadly idiocy dozens of centuries senior,
and that of the Middle East and China, older by millennia. Yet we have just a few short years before
annihilation overtakes us, in the absence of major transformation. All we have to work with are those toddler
Americans, plus everyone else endowed with their fully-grown rot, supposed to
transform this world in an instant. Good
luck with that crew!
Until then, Americans are
just a bunch of corn fed Republicans, which means fascist wannabes who haven’t
quite got it perfect yet. Just give the USA enough rope to hang itself.
Ronnie Raygun wasn’t quite perfect, but nearly
so. What with the Bushes and Nixon and their toadies in the Supreme Court
and Congress; let’s just elect another Weimar Democrat, a plaster
figurehead. Decorative but ineffectual, his relative honesty and
competence are the most we can handle. One step back and three forward,
blindly, into a Thousand Year Reich wrapped in the red, white and blue!
In Iraq, an American Army
of mercenaries (anathema to the spirit of the Constitution) is practicing
‘pacification’ tactics with the military occupation of Buffalo, St. Louis and
Seattle in mind. But don’t worry, be happy! Just be good little boys and girls, sit on
your hands and watch it happen.
Nowadays, Americans may
only harken to arrogant nihilism and dogmatic Puritanism―moral vacuity or
empty moralism for their own sake. Mere profit, dogma, fad and
convenience: those are the only ethical bearings we are allowed. Might as
well try to breathe in a vacuum.
There is a golden mean, a
middle ground of morality this country and WeaponWorld despise. Is the
road to Hell paved with good intentions? In your dreams, perhaps.
In reality, it is paved with Halliburton stock certificates (a Best
Buy!).
Conscience, idealism, just
plain doing good and avoiding evil: those things merit reverence and emulation,
if only because they cause fewer unexpected disasters. Obey your
conscience – even when it seems uncool, inconvenient and unprofitable – and
achieve unforeseen miracles. Violate good conscience, good sense and good
taste, and suffer more often from surprise disaster. Morality as simple probability
and enlightened self-interest. Ignore it at your peril.
After this jeremiad of
American failure, I must emphasize a central point.
Given our Gemini
commonality, we Americans share more power, glory and genius than any other
nation. For two centuries, America has
been settled by the cream of the rest of the world―the very best and the
worst. If we made wise, heroic and
generous use of our advantages (in typically American fashion) we could
neutralize our liabilities and failures.
Americans! Relax and let it all hang out. If we set our strongest sinews and nerves to
their best workout of peace, we would find this effort gracefully natural—and
its rewards, mind-boggling.
Other alternatives will be
no fun at all.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld